This document reviews previous investigations and proposes research related to topics in the processing of visual items. The proposed experiments use reaction time in the context of three experimental tasks. In one, subjects learn about a set of pictures and, for a series of trials, decide whether two successively presented pictures are members of the same category. In another task, the subject is presented with a fragmented visual form, which he is to subsequently compare to a unitary stimulus; the subject is requested to integrate the initially presented fragments in order to facilitate his comparison. The third task requires subjects to decide whether two visually represented common objects are members of a given category. The reaction-time data from these tasks are used to address the following questions: (1) How are visually presented stimuli retained and transformed immediately after their presentation? (2) What is the nature of the representation in memory of categories of visual stimuli? (3) How do the memorial representations of visual information in memory compare to corresponding verbal representations?